The Last Seventeen Years
by Unashamed1
Summary: "There would be hours and days and years in which to talk."
1. The Last Seventeen Years

The Last Seventeen Years

I'm still not sure who realized it first. A moment of frozen silence, and then someone cheered. A roar of sobs, applause and celebration swelled on every side of me, and I let go of the breath that I hadn't realized I was holding. A body slipped past me, then another, and I allowed the growing swell to propel me to where he stood, still and slightly limp, at the center of the hall.

After a moment I was able to almost jog through the crowd, darting around hundreds of warm bodies, until I caught up with Neville and Luna. Without a word or even a look, the three of us raced to him, and managed to squeeze in just behind Ron and Hermione, hundreds of arms and shoulders and torsos pressing against our backs.

"We love you, Harry!"

"Well-done!"

I shouted with them, and kept shouting, even though I knew he probably couldn't hear me. Our voices were a loud boom of incongruent noise, all cheering and crying and tripping and stumbling and layering on top of each other.

My hand brushed against what felt like a hundred others as my fingertips touched his arm. The world around us was still screaming: tears, shouts, congratulations. At one point, I may have swayed into Ron and kicked Hermione trying to regain my balance. In the end, I didn't particularly notice. He was the only thing in front of me.

It was over, and he was here. Standing, and close enough to touch. All at once, I felt one corner of my chest fill and overflow, and for a long moment, I thought I might burst with the euphoria of reality. He was here, he was on his feet. Tired, but standing. Dazed, but alive.

I felt myself smiling and weeping at once, and somehow it felt right; the perfect and only response to what I saw in front of me. My finger tips scratched to gain a grip on his arm, but someone on his other side pulled suddenly, and he was out of my reach. My eyes had managed to hold his face, but he had never looked over.

Ron and Hermione each claimed half of the small space directly in front of him, and I watched the three of them overlap as he almost disappeared behind Ron's height. I couldn't hear them or anyone else over the cacophony of shouts and cheers, but I added my own voice to the celebration and drank my fill of the sight of them.

The headache behind my eyes set in around 7 AM. Neville was still sitting in the center of a pool of admirers with the Sword of Gryffindor lying next to him on the table, catching sunlight from the pale blue ceiling. Somewhere outside, Luna was, apparently, calling to all of us: her voice came closer by the second, announcing something about a, "Blibbering Humdinger."

I snorted into my mother's shoulder and wondered what Fred would have to say about that when I found him, and then gripped Mum's hand as a solid cinder block hit my chest. I waited, eyes closed, while my heart split down the center and twisted on a makeshift axis before returning to normal. I tried not to think about how much more remembering I would be doing in the coming weeks and months.

I eased my head onto Mum's shoulder and watched the great hall in the flood of fresh sunlight. Families re-gathered what was left of their members, friends clung onto each other and smiled and cried, and for one moment, the whole world was this narrow, central strip of Hogwarts Castle. Ron and Hermione were seated a couple of tables away, with their backs to us. I was considering how to extract myself from Mum's grip long enough to go over to them when they both rose from their seats and headed for the door, moving in tandem as if under direction.

"So that's where he went," My voice was closer to Mum's ear than I realized, but she didn't turn. I smiled and rested one hand under my cheek as Ron's and Hermione's backs drifted away from me, focusing on the empty space between them. "I was wondering how he managed to get out of here without us noticing."

I noticed a fresh wave of fatigue rolling through my bones and tried not to wince as I imagined how exhausted he must be. If they knew what they were doing, those two were taking him straight upstairs. Mum's warm fingers reached up and touched my face, then my hair.

I moved the hand on her shoulder to make active contact with her fingers. There was time, weeks, even years, in which to talk. New relief, as strong and fresh as if I hadn't felt it nearly drown me hours earlier, filled my chest and floated down into my stomach. He was here. There was time. I would find him later.

"Ginny."

Someone was shaking my shoulder.

"Ginny."

A gruff whisper. Tired, and a little hollow. Even after I recognized the voice, it took me a moment to open my eyes. Suddenly, the lids felt heavy and slow, resistant to orders.

"Ginny."

When I finally got them open, my mother was standing over me, her hair forming a kind of disheveled tunnel around her face, and almost touching mine.

"I'm ok, Mum." I whispered, even though the room was shrouded, for the moment, in a calm, humming quiet.

She smiled and eased away from me as I managed to sit up.

"I think you should come home with us," She was whispering, too. "Percy's going to stay and help fix things up. Your father and I will come back over with Bill and Charlie after we've all had a few hours sleep."

I glanced behind her at the Great Hall: broken pieces of stone and wood, splinters on the floor, spots that might have been semi-congealed blood on a few stones, and everything covered in a thin layer of dust. The work would still be here when we got back.

I made it to my knees and paused as Mum took my elbow. The thought that had been glowing behind the sluggish buzz in my mind for the hours before I fell asleep finally floated to the top of the jumbled pile. I looked up and pretended that my mother wasn't reacting to the light formation of purple circles under my eyes.

"I want to go see him."

My father approached from behind us as I waited for my mother's response. I glanced over when he cleared his throat, and caught George's heavy, red eyes over Dad's shoulder. I touched my fingers to my mouth and extended them in his direction, and his mouth spazzum-ed in a manful attempt at a smile. Then I shifted my eyes back to my father before either of us could start crying again.

He stared at me with a slightly raised eyebrow until I realized that he'd heard my request.

"I just want to check on him," I added, my voice still soft. "I won't cause anyone trouble. I'll sleep here, and work when you all come back."

Dad opened his mouth, and George cut him off.

"She should look in on Harry," His voice cracked a little. The others turned to look at him. "She can tell us how he is when we come back." He focused his eyes on mine. "Tell him well done, and—" he stopped and swallowed, wincing, "thanks. For me."

"I will," I answered, still a little quieter than normal. I looked back at Dad, and his face was gentle.

"Yes," he glanced at Mum, and I saw her nod. "Go see Harry, then sleep. We'll see you in a little while."

I nodded, and after a full minute, my father reached across the silence and put his arms around me. He made room for Mum and George as they moved in toward us. After he let go of me, I stepped forward and slid my free arm around George until it met the hand that was already on his back.

()

I took the chance that Harry would be looking for a little familiarity after all of this trouble and started searching for him in the Gryffindor dorm. I eased the door to his room open, leaned in, and very nearly turned around and went back down stairs. He had obviously collapsed on the first bed that he happened upon after making it through the door. His back was turned to me, but it was apparent enough that he was dead asleep. I stood in the doorway for a moment, suspended in indecision, and felt my resolve to leave him as he was melt away as he shifted just a little. I caught a glimpse of his gasses sitting on the bedside table from over his shoulder and smiled, wondering where he'd found the wherewithal to remember to take them off.

I was easing down next to him before I had the chance to tell myself that it was a bad idea. I had seen him, seen it all, with my own eyes. I'd watched everything right along with the others, but somehow, I needed more conformation. I needed to touch him, to know with more than just my eyes that he really was here. That he was still with me.

I slid my arm over his and froze when I felt him move. My face grew warm and numbness spread through my stomach.

"I, I'm sorry." All at once I realized that my mouth was right next to his ear. I rolled away from him and got back to my feet. "I didn't mean to—to disturb you. Rest. I just—just wanted to be sure you were alright."

I was turning to go when he answered.

"Ginny." I thought I could hear him smiling.

"Rest," I repeated, turning back to him with my mind still on the door. "I'm going right now."

"You don't have to." For a moment I wondered how much of the gentleness in his voice came from somewhere inside of him and how much of it was residue from sheer fatigue, but I didn't need any further invitation, regardless of the answer.

I settled down next to him again. I had no idea if he was still awake or not, but having him so close seemed to open latch in my chest. I found myself whispering, my fingers stroking his arm as if to confirm that it was real.

"It's over," I muttered near his ear. "You're finished. It's done." Tears swept up my throat with almost no warning as memories assaulted me: everything he had been through, the dozens of times that we—that I—had almost lost him. It covered me, pressing into my skin and twisting my stomach. "All over now." I repeated. "You're free."

I moved in a little closer and tightened my grip on his arm. For the last seventeen years he had belonged to all of us; to everyone in out world who had waited and worked so long to see the shadow we were living with finally fall away. Now, there was some small chance that, for the first time, he could belong to me. Just to me.

It crossed my mind that I should wait until he was asleep again and then go down to find Ron. He would be helping with the work downstairs, and I suddenly felt like I could manage to put in an hour or two before I collapsed. Then I heard Harry sigh into the pillow.

"Ginny," he somehow sounded exhausted and contended at the same time. "Stay. Please." Something about the weight in his voice told me that he was talking about more than just the few hours before the reconstruction work would begin for both of us. I kissed his shoulder and leaned toward his ear.

"I'm not going anywhere." My eyelids started trying to force themselves closed. The adrenaline jolt of seeing him was wearing off. "I'm right here. Whenever you need me."

I have no idea whether or not he was asleep by the time I managed to say, "I love you," but really, it didn't matter. I had time to tell him later. As far as I was concerned, we had nothing but time.


	2. Words and Other Hot, Dangerous Things

Words and Other Hot, Dangerous Things

Less than an hour past sundown and a layer of ice was thickening on the other side of the window. My fingers crept up to the warm patch of skin under my collar bone as I focused my eyes on the trembling white lights fighting their way through the dark from below us.

Warm arms circled my shoulders from the side and almost managed to cut out the cold. I leaned into them and worked one arm around Neville's back.

"If we're still here when the world gets its sanity back, I'm dragging you to Trelawney's and having her check you for The Sight. "

I eased back from him and he released me, lingering at my side.

"Don't need any special abilities to know when you might need that."

"Yeah," I wrapped my fingers around my elbows as the chill seeped back in. "Guess you don't, do you?" I blinked at the dying candles sputtering against the black velvet on the grounds. "But don't think you're getting out of that visit to Trelawney."

I watched him cross his arms over his stomach as he shook his head at the space halfway between me and the floor. A set of candles lit themselves over our heads.

"What?"

"That's why I'm glad you're here."

I blinked and leaned one shoulder against the wall nearest the window. The hovering cold from outside rushed into me and made the world a little sharper for a second.

"Pardon?"

He took a step closer to the window.

"The way you talk about after… all this." He nodded toward the warmer circle toward the center of the room, where a few other DA members circled the fire.

I nodded. It was a funny thing that happened to us sometimes—not just Neville, Luna and I, either. All of us. Every now and then, the words for what we were doing here slipped away from us. The stark, unpleasant names that somehow made it real in a way that even the scarred faces of second years and acidic residue of Cruciatus curses in the air couldn't quite manage, would suddenly become too heavy to voice aloud.

In the beginning, after they'd left, I had gotten it into my head that we needed to embrace the labels. I'd adopted them, tasted the bitterness until it became almost sweet. I'd started to believe that we needed the words; needed to hear and feel and taste what this thing was that we were up against. Even after the others had started following my lead, there were moments when the terms that we'd grown close to still took on their full power and became too much to hold in our mouths. I hugged my elbows a little tighter and managed a smile that probably looked as hollow as it felt.

"The way I talk about it?"

"Like everything is going to get back to business as normal before too long and all we have to do is wait it out. Like you've seen some schedule for this fever dream that we never got to look at. Like you know."

I really did try to smile this time. My face just wouldn't quite work right. Before I could think of something to say that would manage to be encouraging and true at the same time, he added, "that's why we need you."

I blinked and felt a tiny bit breathless for a second. The ice on the glass caught some of the light from the candles and my fingers drifted toward the spark. He let me stand there in silence a few seconds, watching me watch the light.

"It's getting cold."

I felt him take a step closer, but he didn't offer his arms a second time.

"They'll be alright. I'm sure Hermione knows a good heating charm or two."

I nodded, and then gasped as a sudden pain sliced into the side of my face. A second later Neville was at my side, his fingers in my hair and on my shoulder blade. When I looked over, he inclined his head toward the ceiling without pausing in his work.

"Wax." He set the already cooling debris on the window sill as the spot on my cheek where it had grazed me started to burn.

A small crash followed by laughter drew my eyes away from the window. Cho shoved Pavrati lightly on the shoulder as the remains of a shattered chess piece hit the floor. I turned back to Neville, and this time the smile actually worked.

"Neville, how'd we end up running this mess, exactly?"

He glanced back at the group around the fire and offered me a little shrug.

"Because they aren't sure where else to look, and as far as they're concerned, we're the next best thing to Harry."

I'd grown to love the way that he could do that—look at the world with such clear eyes. Simple. Direct. Most days I felt like I couldn't see through the fog long enough to walk in a straight line. I bit my lip against a sudden bizarre urge to smile as the warm spot on my face started to smolder. Whatever he said, I was pretty sure that I needed him more than anyone here needed me.


	3. Bound

Disclaimer: nothing you recognize belongs to me.

Bound

"I should stay."

I could feel Neville's eyes from across the table, but I couldn't manage to look at him. I'd spotted the podium at the front of the hall before I had sat down and fixed my eyes on it. It was the only thing in the room not touched with holly or something else unnaturally green. My jaw tightened a little as the resolve settled over me. "Stay?" Neville's voice jolted me just enough to make me turn my head. "Here? The whole time?"

"I'll write Mum tomorrow. She won't like it, but—"

I caught a glimpse of a dark red silk ribbon over Neville's shoulder and re-directed my attention to his eyes before I could take in the whole tree. I glanced over at the Professor's table long enough to watch each of the Carrows scan one side of the room. My eyes shot back to Neville and my voice volume dropped far enough to nestle underneath the confused, gentle buzz of conversation that everyone made a point of keeping up.

There were days, a thousand year ago now, when that underlying hum had left me with a clinched jaw and a head ache. Since the Carrows took us all under their benevolent wings, I had learned to taste something sweet in that sound; learned to breathe it in and take some kind of strength from it. We had never discussed it directly, but I was pretty sure that everyone did it on purpose. We took these few opportunities that we had as a unified whole to create cracks in the rigid, enforced silence that hung over us. Silence was fear and control. Our relentless rhythmic voices, whenever we could gather them together, were a quiet chorus of resistance.

Neville leaned toward the plate of toast between us and rested his fingers on a burnt piece near the edge. His eyes were on the food, but his attention was on me.

"Why would you stay here?"

I tore my eyes from the podium, and a brief, undisciplined moment put me in direct eye contact with a small porcelain angel that someone had slipped into the six-foot tree a few feet behind Neville. My jaw clinched for a second as I shifted my gaze down toward his hand. There was something perverse about a castle full of reminders of Christmas under the Carrows's watch. I glanced over my shoulder at the backs of three first years at the Ravenclaw table.

"Can't exactly leave them here, can I?" I leaned toward Neville until I was sure that he could hear me, forgetting to make an attempt at acting naturally as the fingers of my left hand gripped the edge of the table. "The…the ones that are staying behind. There aren't many, as far as I can gather, but I know that at least five of us will be here over Christmas." I swallowed and forced myself to stay quiet until I was sure that my voice volume was back under control. "I'm supposed to just leave them here?"

His fingers slipped off of the plate between us as a smile edged up his face. I swallowed as a flash of heat cut through me, there and gone like the dying breath of a firework.

"Notice something funny, Longbottom? Because the last thing I heard was us considering leaving a bunch of barely trained kids here with no protection."

His expression didn't even flicker as he leaned back a little and studied me across the table.

"Send them to me, and I'll make sure that they're on the train with the rest of us tomorrow."

I blinked as the divergence between the subject at hand and his damn smile tugged at the edge of my sense of reason.

"Good." My voice was flat in my own ears. "Brilliant. Thank you."

"Of course."

His eyes hovered on mine as he reached for a plate of butter somewhere to the left and pushed it toward me. My fingertips rested on its edge, but his didn't move. I blinked.

"What?"

"It's not your job, you know." His voice hovered just under the room's general volume, but I had a bizarre feeling that the shift had more to do with me than with any desire to avoid Carrow's notice.

"Pardon?"

"To look after them," his eyes flickered to the table around us before coming back to me. "To protect them. They aren't your job."

I opened my mouth to argue before I realized that I didn't have anything to say. The heat pressed into me again, all at once, ripping up and down my body and feeding on the sudden, irrational anger that the observation drew out of me. I watch him watching me and felt suddenly like I had lost a chess match.

I slid a second slice of toast off of the plate and the suspended pause between us was broken. My fingertips went to work taking my breakfast apart as I studied the man that, somewhere on this strange, surreal ride, I had come to think of as my partner. After another minute the heat slowed to a quiet smolder and I managed to find my voice.

"You have somewhere safe for them to go?"

Merlin take him, that damn smile flickered up on the edges of his mouth.

"Of course," he answered. "They'll be taken care of like you'd done it yourself."

I let a full minute of silence hover between us as I watched his eyes.

"I know," I answered finally.

"Good." He looked down at my full plate for a second before nudging it toward me. "Now eat."

()

I tugged a little harder than I should have and watched a thin, knotted web of hair flutter to the floor. My muscles took over where my mind refused to act, searching out the next knot, manipulating the dead extension of my living cells until another delicate collection of strands pulled free from my scalp and hit the floor. The soft knock on the door hadn't quite reached me when her voice pulled me out of my own mind.

"If you put it up it wouldn't tie itself like that."

Charlotte hovered on the edge of the doorframe in a way that made her look small, even for a third year. I took a deep breath and felt the tension in my muscles release. I bit my lip and felt the sudden need to apologize. Charlotte was good at reading those things: the little poison- tipped messages that we send each other without even noticing it. I rested the brush in my lap and did my best to smile.

"Thanks." Actually, I kind of liked the knots. Ripping them out and watching them fall to the floor gave me a minuscule bit of mastery over chaos; a little illusion of power that, I was pretty sure, helped me stay sane when I needed it most. Of course, I had no idea how to explain that without sounding clinically mad, so maybe it was better to skip the details.

I glanced over her shoulder as a breath of torch smoke floated in from the hall. "Shouldn't you be packing?"

She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and shook her head.

"I think I'm staying behind tomorrow—but my brother will be here, too. We'll be alright."

She looked me up and down, and then caught my eyes, pressing her gaze into mine so hard it almost knocked the wind out of me. Her desperation for me to believe her, to stop worrying, made me a little sick. I took a breath and pushed back as I claimed her eyes. The silence hovered over us for a second as I wondered, for the ten thousandth time, how much the walls of these rooms could hear now. What I should and should not say.

"You know Neville Longbottom?"

"Do I-" she paused, and I saw her look over her shoulder into the hall before taking a step inside. "Yeah."

I nodded.

"Go see him tonight. Say goodbye before he leaves."

I watched her blink at me until a glimmer of understanding broke over her face.

"Right," she answered finally. "I'll do that."

A still moment passed, and I finally offered her a stiff nod that seemed to give her permission to move. I turned my eyes back to the floor and started in on the next knot as the echo of her steps in the hallway anchored me deeper into the stones bellow us.


	4. Cramped Spaces

**Cramped Spaces**

I had just worked the corner of my trunk free of the second-to-last step when another pair of hands lowered into my eye line, gripping the bottom and easing it down onto the platform. "Thanks," I raised my eyes up just enough to see him through a curtain of my own hair. We set the trunk down on the stones near the platform sign at the same moment, moving in tandem in the way that had developed almost without our notice. "But you really didn't have t—"

"I know," he straightened up and offered me a gentle smile, an edge of familiarity in his tone. A comfortable silence hung between us as a sharp breeze kicked up from somewhere to the West. I took a step back under the pretext of shaking the hair out of my face and forced the brightest smile I could manage.

"You know your agreement to watch my back doesn't necessarily extend beyond the castle."

He looked me over in that way that gave me the maddening feeling of being shut out of something: blank, but somehow infused with a language that I couldn't read. His moment of study apparently over, her shrugged his shoulders and I watched the layer of glass fall away.

"I guess it's just not that easy to turn off."

A chuckle escaped my throat.

"No. Guess it isn't."

I closed the gap I had created between us and extended my arms toward him. The smell of roses and wet earth enveloped me as he accepted the offer. "Be careful, Neville."

It should have felt like an odd thing to say, back in London and getting ready to go home on holiday. But repetition had elevated it to something bordering on reflex. It was part of the reservoir of automatic responses that line themselves up and file out of our mouths without help from the conscious mind. But he squeezed me a little harder before letting go, anyway. The voice of the crowd was starting to take on its own rhythm, the space around us filling with the quiet, pulsing energy that rushes into any corner of the world where too much human life occupies too little space. I could feel the insistent existence of the crowd pulling on us from every angle it could reach, but his eyes were locked on mine.

"And you relax." He dropped his voice bellow the confused hum around us. "Please."

I felt one corner of my mouth quirk upward as I leaned away from him, appraising the dried mud on his robes and black circle under his left eye, still healing from the Carrow's latest attempt to make him see reason.

"Meaning?"

He matched my stance, resting his arms over his stomach as he quirked an eyebrow at me.

"Meaning you're off duty, General Weasley. It's ok to go home and enjoy yourself. Stop worrying all the time. For a little while, at least."

The statement seemed to bring a sudden increase of oxygen into the station with it, but I managed to keep my face blank as I studied him between the first flakes of a new snowfall. He wasn't the only one who could hide behind glass.

I took a long, slow breath of as a small group of first and second years, huddled a few yards behind Neville, caught my eye. I shifted my eyes back to his and inclined my chin toward his waiting charges.

"You're sure you have them covered, then?"

Neville glanced over his shoulder. When he looked back, he offered me a slightly exaggerated sigh, his smile somehow amused and resigned at the same time.

"Happy Christmas, Ginny."

I bit my lip as he folded his arms around me again. I'm not sure if he felt the bit of extra pressure I applied just before letting go.

"Happy Christmas, Neville."

()

Two days before Christmas, something about my tendency to treat the vegetables as though there were guilty of a capital crime got me excused from the kitchen. The smell of wood smoke and the sound of Bill and Charlie's voices from the living room sent me veering to the right as I left the smell of cinnamon and half-cooked ham behind me.

I'm pretty sure that my brothers assume that the narrow door just off the living room leads to an extra broom closet. As I rattled the doorknob, first to the right, then up and down, I was happier than ever that I had never corrected them. The room was a little narrow, but the window and the rickety piano that someone had shoved into one corner were enough to make it cozy. I pulled out one of the old blankets I'd hidden here and draped it over the piano bench (this room gets strangely damp after a good snow fall) and closed my coat against the chill. I was pulling the quill out of my pocket before I even noticed that my hand had moved.

"Loqui Secretum—Longbottom." The quill glowed red, then gold against the scarred wood of the piano. A moment later, Neville's voice filled the space around me, as close as if he were sitting next to me on the bench.

"Evening, Weasley. How are you holding together?"

A chill ripped down my back and I reached for my wand to try one of the warming charms we used for autumn Quidditch practices. The living room would be warm by now, but I couldn't bring myself to go in there quite yet.

"Well enough now I've found an empty room."

He chuckled and I felt myself smiling, too.

"Your family getting under your skin already?"

I opened my mouth searching for a snarky answer, but something stopped me long enough for the truth to push its way forward.

"It isn't them…not really. I just…" a half-laugh filled my throat as an uneasiness I couldn't name rose in my stomach. "I think I just miss you lot. Mad as that sounds."

"Doesn't sound so mad to me."

"Not under normal circumstances," I added. "But…you have to admit it's a bit odd. Here I am with a whole house to roam round in, and I'm missing being crammed into one room with eighteen other people."

A soft, low chuckle filled the empty air next to me.

"Yeah," he answered finally, "I guess that does sound a bit mad."

I offered a brisk nod even though he couldn't see me.

"Precisely. This whole mess is starting to turn my basic understanding of reality upside down."

"Maybe that's a good thing."

I blinked at the quill.

"Pardon?"

When he broke the silence, that simple, matter of fact tone that I'd learned to find some odd comfort in had settled back into his voice.

"An inverted sense of reality should be pretty helpful when you get back to the madhouse."

I let out a strangled chuckle.

"True enough."

A peaceful silence stretched between us as the cold rolled over the edges of the charm and I felt something approaching joy for the first time in months.

"While I am flattered to be missed, please try not to think about us so much for a while. Don't worry—we can both go back to having heart palpitations over everyone else soon enough."

I sat there with Neville's voice hovering around me until I could convince him that I would take his advice and go "enjoy my family." When the voice faded, I sat in the greying glow of my charm, staring at my hands on the piano without seeing them as the room grew cold around me. I had walked in here sensing that I was being tugged away from my family without knowing why. I hadn't really fixed the tugging part, but at least now I had better knowledge of the problem.

It was true: I did miss the others in the DA, and I came here because I needed someone other than those I was with. But I hadn't contacted Luna; I hadn't reached out to Seamus; I hadn't even thought of asking for Dean. The first and only name that had come to mind had been the one I'd instructed the charm to reach for me. And, for some reason, that knowledge made me slightly sick as I stumbled back into the hall at the sound of someone calling my name.


End file.
